So I check ahrefs every day to see how my site is progressing. I checked it on Monday and all was looking fairly normal, but something weird happened between then and last night:

- My backlinks jumped from 66 to 120, most of which have the anchor text of my main keyword.

- My "404 Redirected" plugin on Wordpress shows that there are about 240 new URLs showing up (e.g. people are trying to access URLs that don't exist and they are being redirected to the main page) These URLs do not exist on my site, although I happen to know that my domain was used before; they appear to be from that old website that used to be on it.

What's the deal with this? Somehow, ~80 backlinks to old URLs from the previous site just get indexed overnight? I guess it's a good thing to have more backlinks, but does anyone know specifically what happened there?

Scan backlinks and see where the urls is posted at?
One senario could be that someone is trying to neg-ranking you for "dublicate content", e.g: domain.com?123, domain.com?456 and domain.com?789, if all urls show the same content, wich they wont if they get redirected to your homepage.

- My "404 Redirected" plugin on Wordpress shows that there are about 240 new URLs showing up (e.g. people are trying to access URLs that don't exist and they are being redirected to the main page) These URLs do not exist on my site, although I happen to know that my domain was used before; they appear to be from that old website that used to be on it.

Thanks.

Click to expand...

Typically the 404 issue is a bot scanning your site for auto signups, commenting or some other stuff.. What are the URL's? /admin /signup /comments and such?
I get stuff like that every now and then, it's nothing to worry about. They're just scanning for footprints.

Yea, they were some of that admin, signup, comments, login, forgot password, etc. but there were also a lot of odd ones like "p=58" etc. There were even a few that were article titles related to my niche, presumably from the old site that used to be on that domain (because I never created posts with those titles)

Do you think this is related to the apparent spike in backlinks showing in ahrefs?

PS: I checked on Majestic SEO's free site explorer tool, and it doesn't show them... Is it possible that ahrefs just has a glitch, or is Majestic a little slower picking them up?

Note that adblockers might block our captcha, and other functionality on BHW so if you don't see the captcha or see reduced functionality please disable adblockers to ensure full functionality, note we only allow relevant management verified ads on BHW.